War Worlds

By Dennis Mathis

Two heroes fight across both earth and an alien world in 1943. P51 Mustang ace, Captain John Crickshank, while patrolling above the Congolese jungle, encounters a Nazi jet plane. The jet is armed with a device that thrusts him and his P51 into an alien world. Giselle Isubu-Petitclerc is the exotic and deadly daughter of a French missionary father and an African mother. Educated at the Sorbonne, she is also an expert jungle fighter. Crickshank fights to survive in the alien world with the help of an assorted cast of similarly transported soldiers and pilots. At the same time, Giselle battles through forbidden areas of the Congo to discover the truth of Nazi designs on earth. Both Crickshank and Giselle battle to stop the Nazis, but other deadly foes, including two ancient demons – the Impundulu – are in the way. Inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. Rider Haggard, War Worlds is a high adventure where merciless Grey Warriors, the mythical and vampiric Impundulu, a psychopathic German corporal and an army of terrifying Stickmen stand between the two heroes and Nazi ambitions. War Worlds is written for adult audiences.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dennis Mathis
• Release date: Dec 4, 2012
• ISBN: 9781301912315

Dennis Mathis

Dennis Mathis and his wife Nancy live near Durango, Colorado in a log cabin that they, with the help of their children, built themselves. Dennis taught writing on the college level for a number of years, and he also worked in public relations. He has been writing for years and has had a number of his plays produced for the stage. Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard and Jules Verne with their tales of high adventure were early influences on his writing.

Book preview

Chapter One

Oil pelted the cockpit canopy so hard that Crickshank could hear the impact of the droplets above the cough of the Merlin engine. He eyed the oil pressure gauge. Ixnay – the needle was knocking zero. The P51 Mustang had only a few minutes before the engine packed up and the plane fell to the jungle below. Crickshank banked left as he fought the stick. He looked over the wing, past the star decal, toward the ground. He saw nothing but endless green jungle divided by snaking rivers. Snakes, thought Crickshank. I’ll bet there’s a slew of snakes down there. He laughed. What the hell difference did that make? He was fixin’ to become a smoking hole 20 feet deep in the Congo.

His wings were shot up. His rudder had mostly crapped out. At least there wasn’t any fire. The second that thought popped in his head, orange flames licked from the engine cowl. Well shit fire, he said in an East Texan accent. What the hell else could happen?

He shouldn’t have asked. As he glanced up over the long nose of the plane, through the blur of the propeller, a Nazi war bird emerged from a wispy cloud. Ain’t that very goddamn convenient? He thought he’d killed every one of the bastards 50 miles back. Three mottled black and green BF109s. Three against one. He’d flamed them all. He thought.

He shook his head. He was flying out of a U.S. Army Air Corps secret base in the Congo, hacked out of solid jungle. He had been assigned there for two weeks. He had no idea that Germans were in the area. The American base commander, Major Harrow had forgotten to mention that little detail. Major Harrow was a legendary hard-ass. His face was the model for the Frankenstein monster in the famous 1930s movie. That was the story anyway, and it was easy to believe. Harrow’s wide-set eyes never blinked. His square jaw was stone. His black hair was plastered to the bony ridges of his head, and he pissed fire and smoke. When he opened his mouth, his teeth were the shape and size of dominoes. A real beauty.

Harrow had Captain Crickshank flying CAP every day from the moment he steamed into camp on a beat-up river boat, playing poker with the native crew and slapping mosquitoes the size of Texas horny toads. The missions Crickshank flew were senseless. Fly for one hour to some point on the compass, turn 90 degrees, fly for another hour, turn and fly directly back to base. Fly at 8500 feet. Exactly 250 knots. Full load of ammo. Wheels up at 0600 hours, wheels down at 0930. Crickshank told the flight mechanics he was flying the hypotenuse. They had no idea what he meant. Neither did he. But every day, same mission, same result –zero. Until today.

This morning, three bogies jumped him 90 minutes into the mission. The way Crickshank saw it, the hypotenuse mission was horseshit, but it belonged to the United States of America, and three lousy krauts could kiss his khaki-clad, parachute-padded ass. He gave them each a dose of .50 caliber pills and watched them auger down into Tarzan country 8500 feet below. In the process, they counter-punched him pretty good for Rhine monkeys. They left him bleeding and smoking, limping back to base. Even his watch got shot clean off his wrist. Today would have been a good time to have a wingman. He had mentioned that to Harrow once, but the major growled, Not for combat air patrol in the middle of the jungle. Asshole.

Now he was in trouble. This new bogey was at Crickshank’s ten o’clock, a few hundred feet above him and pointing its business end right at him. Gun muzzles stuck out of the ugly grey hull of the bogey as big as naval batteries. Balkenkreuze on the wings, swastikas on the tail. Crickshank imagined the goggled face of the pilot grinning insanely as his pipper slid toward the American flyer. Another kill for the master race; another victory bar painted on Fritz’s rudder. The glorious feel of 30 mm cannon spitting hot lead at the American’s nose. Sieg Heil! Crickshank cursed. Time to break radio silence. He keyed the mike. The radio was set to base frequency.

Harrow, you asshole. I got goddamn krauts all over the place, he yelled into the mike. I got holes where North American didn’t put holes. I’m gonna kill you, Harrow. He miked off and fingered the trigger on the control grip. He was probably out of radio range, but yelling relieved his nausea. He was choking on oil smoke.

Amerikaner, his radio crackled. The kraut had been monitoring his frequency. Crickshank startled at the voice in his ear. I have a suzprize for you, said the kraut voice.

Crickshank grimaced and toggled his mike. Ya? Crickshank replied with a snarl, Listen, Fritz. I have a suzprize for you. Hitler’s in my cockpit sucking my… Crackle. Crickshank let go of the transmit button and concentrated on the incoming fighter. He jerked the nose of the Mustang around to his left and shot a wild burst of 50s. A line of tracers arced wide of the German plane. The two planes shot toward each other in the high, bright sky.

Laughter crackled over Crickshank’s radio. Not close. Now you will feel the bolt of Thor. The bogie was diving in at Crickshank as he pulled up toward it. He looked closely.

What the hell kind of plane is that? No propeller. Huge, smoking pods hanging off each wing. Then he got it. An operational jet – a blow job as the American wags referred to the new German fighter. First one he had ever seen. But there was something else odd about it.

Lights whirled outward from the nose of the Nazi aircraft. Arms of light spun out like children being thrown from a spinning merry-go-round. Crickshank’s finger pulled the trigger. Suddenly smoke and fire from his own engine obscured the German fighter. Crickshank fired blindly through the black pall. He felt the Mustang jump backwards from the recoil of six .50 caliber machine guns. No short bursts. He cooked off his whole load of ammo in one long pull. All his chips were in. He gave Fritz the whole nine yards of solid American brass and lead.

Then light filled his cockpit. Light that penetrated the oily smoke. Everything slowed to a dream. The light was like honey in his brain. Crickshank’s mind was slow and confused. The light was so bright, he couldn’t see the instruments on the panel in front of him. He turned his head to the side. His head moved slowly through the light as though his head was sinking into amber. He could see nothing out of the cockpit. And strange though it was, he was fully conscious. He could feel the control stick in his hands, his feet on the rudders. He knew that he was in a desperate dogfight, but the sense of reality was gone. And then even reality itself was gone. For a moment, bliss and darkness were entire, and the world, the rage and the fear were absent.

Then the world came back in a rush. The honeyed light disappeared and the sky-bright world returned. He was at treetop level, screaming across the jungle at 250 knots, flames shooting out of the engine cowl. He could feel the heat as flames licked back toward the canopy. He had little control over the plane. He waggled the stick. The plane was sluggish. He pushed the throttle forward and pulled up the nose. The plane crabbed sideways. He applied full rudder and felt the plane swing slowly like a rusty gate. The crabbing stopped, but the plane continued to fall.

Crickshank saw a clearing in the dark green rushing by below him. More than a clearing. It looked like a landing strip made of crushed rock. He didn’t think. He let the plane crab a bit more until it lined up with the runway, and then he dropped his landing gear. Machinery groaned as the wheels unfolded beneath the fuselage. He toggled the flaps. They didn’t deploy, being shot full of holes and cables severed. He cut the throttle, pulled hard back on the stick. Oil poured out of the engine in a black stream running down the Mustang’s long nose toward the canopy, and flames from the engine ignited the stream of oil. In an instant, he had a blowtorch in his face. He was dropping fast despite the upward pitch. Too fast. He was not going to survive this landing.

The plane hit the ground so hard that Crickshank slammed his head against the canopy despite his harness. He cut the engine, applied brakes and lost consciousness. The stench of black oily smoke and the sound of laughter crackling over the radio were the last things he remembered.

Chapter Two

A jungle girl stood beneath a tall teak tree, in an open grove of African teak trees. The trees were 20 meters tall and formed a green canopy over the muddy ground. High in the canopy, hornbills and grey parrots ruled the jungle heights, like the Luftwaffe ruled the skies of Paris. About ten meters from the ground, the jungle girl saw a monkey silently watching her. Its arms were wrapped around the tree, and two large eyes peered around the trunk at her. She wasn’t interested in monkey meat, or bush meat in general, but she could have easily palmed the hunga munga dangling at her waist and, with a deft throw, have split the curious primate’s skull. Something else interested her at the moment however.

Moist things dripped on her bare shoulders as she bent to look at a strange track. The Congo was full of moist things. Drops of water from the sky. Sap weeping from leaves. Worms bitten in half by very large spiders. Blood seeping from a bird’s breast. A butterfly’s head torn from its body. Feces. Urine. It didn’t pay to think about moist things in the rainforest. She studied the track.

It was an elephant track, pressed deep in the chocolate-colored mud. It was splattered with bright red blood. She crouched to look at it more closely. She dipped a finger in a smear of blood and the blood was wet and fresh. She raised her head and saw a muddy trail torn through the forest. Seeds of the trees were mashed into the ground; broad-leafed plants were savaged and broken. The destruction, the blood told a story – a story that brought a hardness to her eyes. She touched the haft of her polished steel hunga munga. Its edges were razor sharp. She stood and followed the trail.

This was a real girl in a real jungle, not like the Jungle Girl serial in movie theaters. The movie star jungle girl, Frances Gifford, was gorgeous, but too soft. The woman who followed the blood trail was nothing like Frances Gifford. She had seen such movies, like the popular Tarzan movies, and she scoffed at the ridiculousness. Cheetah was unrealistic. Chimps are incredibly vicious animals, she knew from firsthand knowledge. Johnny Weissmuller though. She liked him. She enjoyed watching him traipse through the Hollywood jungle in his loin cloth. She didn’t scoff at him. But Frances Gifford would have died a quick and grisly death in a real jungle like this one. Not like Giselle Isubu-Petitclerc who could smell a lion 100 meters away and knew to watch for bubbles at the edge of the sluggish jungle rivers.

She had lived most of her life in the rainforest, and she had seen it devour countless Europeans. Weak, arrogant fools either too greedy or too proud to understand the vast, ancient ways of the great continent. Their white skin blistered in its sun, rotted in its dripping forests, wasted with its fevers. She, herself, was a combination of French and native Congolese and her skin was the color of rich chocolate lit by sunlight. She was 5’ 10" tall and muscled, as though hard, round apples had been strategically stitched beneath her skin. Her eyes were brown flecked with gold. Her hair was black, Negroid, and thick—an abundance of beauty, bravely braided with bits of ivory and bone.

Had Giselle given the matter conscious thought, she would have despised another aspect of Africa as depicted in movies. The actors wore costumes that looked like animal skins. Giselle, who had studied physics and chemistry at the Sorbonne, was more practical. She wore survival clothes of her own making, sewn from lightweight ventile, a tough fabric used by RAF pilots in their flight suits. Ventile trousers and shirt were snug against her skin to prevent loose cloth from snagging on thorns. No underwear (it had a tendency to get wet and stay wet). Thick-soled boots. She carried a pistol with which she was proficient and the sweetly balanced hunga munga with which she was deadly. And beautiful cats did not have to die to provide her clothing.

She felt deadly as she came upon a substantial pool of blood after a half hour of tracking. It was covered with black flies and beetles. Round, bloody elephant prints led out of the scarlet pool and turned downhill toward the river. The elephant she was tracking was badly hurt and seeking a cool refuge. Giselle looked more closely. She saw one clear boot print. Men were on the trail of the elephant. The tracks, both man and elephant, turned into thicker, darker jungle, heading down to the wet, nearly impenetrable growth nearer the river. Her nostrils flared, and the scent came to her on the faintest of breezes. She followed.

She moved deliberately into the mottled shadows, letting the plant life engulf her. She could see only a few yards ahead. This is how people die, she thought, in the dark places of the jungle. Yet she was not afraid. She was a mantis, the green death, stalking in silence. The smell grew thicker. A rich, musky odor of bull elephant. The sweet, cloying smell of hot blood. The acrid sweat smell of men on the hunt. She pictured the situation before she saw it, just from the layers of smell. She heard rushing water too. A river moved just on the other side of this dense stand of undergrowth. She deftly inserted her hand into the bush in front of her. Slowly she pulled back the branches. She leaned her face forward into the opening.

Four, five, six men stood in a semi-circle facing an aged, sagging elephant standing knee-deep in the slowly flowing river. The elephant was a bull with large tusks. Giselle knew he was old from the yellowed ivory and the old scars that crossed his body. Blood streamed from a half dozen holes in his shoulder and side. A red stripe ran down his wrinkled, grey leg to the turbid waters of the river. His head was drooping. No more running, thought Giselle—the elephant had stopped to face its tormentors. She could see the elephant’s eye, small and watery for such a large animal. The eye rolled white with fear and shock.

Insects crawled down her arms, under her shirt. A drop of sweat rolled from the corner of her eye. She remained motionless. She absorbed the scene and let the fury flow into her. The men were Vichy French. She recognized the hated uniforms and insignia. They lifted their German made rifles, Karabiner 98ks, and directed the muzzles toward the elephant. They each took different stances, a couple even bringing their rifles up to their cheeks to aim. The wounded animal, big as an anti-aircraft blimp, was no more than 30 meters from them. One of the men turned slightly to the side and showed Giselle his profile. It was a fine, French profile, refined and aristocratic. She noticed his rank insignia. He was an officer. She knew in an instant that he was a man who read books, drank rare wines with a connoisseur’s palate and made love to women as sport. And murdered elephants from sheer boredom.

She enjoyed killing such men, and she had killed several of them since Hitler’s puppets had replaced the true French in the chateaus of power. She moved suddenly, like a crocodile exploding from its ambush. She crashed through the entangling brush, striding quickly toward the men. One of them softly spoke, Eh? and looked over his shoulder at her. The others slowly began to turn. The officer lowered his rifle, and at first he started to smile. Quizzical. Confused. What was this beautiful forest vision striding toward him with eyes of fire? Surely more than a woman, eh? A dryad from the ancient tales? His desire stirred.

She slipped her hand toward the hunga munga at her waist. She never hesitated.

Chapter Three

Crickshank opened one eye. He tried to open the other eye. It stuck. He raised his left hand to the stuck eyelid and pushed it up off his eye like peeling the skin back from a grape. He looked around. The canopy was cracked and smeared with burned oil. The control panel was popping like pork rinds in hot grease. Wires were hanging like loops of spaghetti. He peeked down at his right hand. It was wrapped around the control grip. It took a bit of thought, sort of like calculating the odds of drawing an ace when you’re holding two face cards, but he consciously eased his grip and peeled his fingers away.

Crickshank could smell the wires burning, the vacuum tubes cracking off with heat. An acrid smoke poured up between his legs and escaped from a hole in the canopy above his head. Note to U.S. Army, he muttered with bloody lips, I.O.U. one Mustang. He groaned as he began to move. Crap. Everything hurt but his left ass cheek and that was numb. He had a knot on his head. It was as if some old boy with an axe handle had worked him over but good. He had been in a few honky-tonk fights, and he felt like he had been administered a good old-fashioned Red River ass-whippin’.

Crickshank pulled the canopy back. He was quickly enveloped in smoke. He fumbled with the harness and got it unbuckled. He slumped to one side. The plane was leaning to starboard. The starboard side gear had collapsed upon impact. The port side gear was intact. Sturdy bastard, the 51. He pushed up out of the seat and got a mouthful of fresh air. He was alive. Those snakes may be a problem after all, he thought. He giggled, shook his head and felt his brain rattle.

He was halfway out when he heard an ominous sound. Roaring, angry animal noises. He stopped giggling and looked down the runway. Jesus. What the – He almost filled up his pants with the last K-ration he didn’t enjoy. A gang of what looked like apes was running toward him, except they didn’t look like apes. They looked like hairy japs. Extremely hairy japs with lots of muscles and slanted eyes. And they had rifles. He threw his leg over the side of the plane and dropped to the ground. He almost collapsed and groaned in pain. But his legs held him up, which was good because he had to run like hell. Stiff and hurt, he started hobbling. What the hell were those things? He looked over his shoulder. Their growls and cries sounded like a mob from an insane asylum. He hobbled faster. Ugly bastards. He slapped at his recalcitrant thighs. Come on legs, can the gold bricking. He rolled big white eyeballs back at the gibbering attackers and picked up speed.

He was cramped up and his right leg had a piece of shrapnel in it. Not bad, but it hurt. And he hadn’t been running a lot of track and field recently. In fact, he spent most of his time in the shitty shack they called an officer club drinking a concoction that tasted more like W.C. Field’s piss than beer. He smoked too much. Running was something for ground pounders, not aces of the sky. The monkey japs were going to catch him. Definitely.

He reached for his sidearm as he ran toward the edge of the runway. The plane had skidded to the right as he landed, so it was almost off the runway anyway. He only had a few yards to the edge of the hard-packed gravel and rock. He got there, jumped down in a shallow ditch and almost blacked out with the pain in his leg. He had his Colt 1911 out, and that was some compensation. He could always use it to shoot himself in the head. If he didn’t miss. He didn’t spend much time on the firing range either.

Dense jungle grew right up to the runway. Jeez, he thought. They hacked this strip out of the thickest, darkest jungle he had ever seen. Darkest Africa. No shit. He glanced over his shoulder as he went into the bush. The monkey japs were a lot closer and a lot uglier. Bald heads with eyes like cats, short ape-like legs and ludicrously thick upper bodies. They didn’t run like apes, but like men, standing straight up. Fortunately for Crickshank, however, they didn’t seem to have the knack of running and shooting because the rifles he saw were not pointed at him. Not yet. He plunged into the forest.

He was coughing the oily smoke out of his lungs, and the heavy moist air he breathed in felt good. Kind of. There just wasn’t enough of it. But as he crashed through the wall of jungle, he started heaving from a few years of too many Lucky Strikes. The American Tobacco Company swore on a stack of Bibles ten feet high that gaspers were good for you. Yeah right. It was probably the powdered eggs making his lungs clog up. They sure as hell made his colon clog up. He heaved and got a gulp of air the size of a raisin. Shit.

He fought his way through a bunch of sticky, thorny stuff, slipped a couple of times in the mud and stumbled out into a clearing. A couple of fallen trees were lying in the mud on the far side of the clearing, and he banked sharply toward them. He slipped in the mud and came down on one knee hard. Goddamn that hurt! Now he was really riled. He regained his feet and staggered toward the cover. He thought he could reach those trees. But then what did he know? He wasn’t good at predicting things like his own death.

He heard a lot of bird noise around the clearing, but the monkey japs were caterwauling like they were being scalded, almost drowning the birds out. His pursuers broke out of the clearing about the same time he reached the downed trees. He lunged behind the thick mossy tree trunks not more than 40 yards in the lead. He swiveled around, poked his head up over the thick tree trunk, and leveled the big .45 at the lead pursuer.

He was a big one. He wore ugly green clothing with a strange shiny metal disc like a dinner plate covering his groin area. Like a Highlander’s sporran, which now that he thought about it, was a pretty silly-assed way to dress. Crickshank refocused his eyes with a shake of his head. The creature in the lead was charging full speed, running like Louie Zamperelli, carrying his rifle at his side. Behind him came the whole gang, 15 or 20 of the brutes. Crickshank was breathing hard, so the gun sight was moving up and down as he looked down the well-oiled barrel. He grabbed the pistol with both hands. He aimed at the big chest when Hairy was about 20 yards away. Maybe he should give the beast a warning shot. He thought about it.

Nah. Crickshank pulled the trigger and the big gun bucked. He was aiming at the wide, hairy chest. He hit the groin plate, a good foot and a half below the chest. The slug tore through the thin metal and knocked the creature backwards. The area between the beast’s legs disappeared in a red mist. And then its massive body slid down into the weeds. The body trembled slightly and was still. Crickshank could see a massive chest above the sedge. It wasn’t moving. Damn, said Crickshank, shot low. Shot his jewels off. The other monkey japs skidded to a halt and turned tail. They practically climbed over each other fleeing Crickshank’s deadly accuracy. Come back, you yellow-bellied sons-a-bitches, he yelled. He stood up and waved his gun at them as they disappeared into the forest wall. I’ll shoot all your nuts off. There was silence for a moment then a volley of rifle fire came out of the trees and bullets buzzed by Crickshank’s head and thudded into the wet tree trunk he was standing behind. He quickly ducked down behind the tree.

Crickshank would have felt pretty good about his chances but